Exclusive: Anthony C. Ferrante Talks Sharknado 5; Mock Poster Debut

This Sunday saw the premiere of Sharknado 5: Global Swarming on Syfy, and director Anthony C. Ferrante was kind enough to share some rather cool stuff with us to keep the storm going!

“When we decided we were going to have some of SHARKNADO 5 set in London, and we were actually going to film there, it was a no-brainer that we needed to pay some love to AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON,” Ferrante tells us. “One of the first things I knew we had to do was create an update on John Landis’ SEE YOU NEXT WEDNESDAY movie in-joke. Since we’re a remake culture, I guessed that the skin flick version of SEE YOU NEXT WEDNESDAY would likely be transformed into a legitimate Broadway play in present day, which is what we did. Our amazing production designer Felix Coles had her graphic designer Lee F-W put this artwork together, and it appears throughout the London sequence on billboards and a London bus. The poster also has some cool Easter egg credits on it too. I also won’t say that’s not the only visual WEREWOLF references you’ll find, but I won’t spoil all of them here.”

“The other big thing was getting David Naughton in SHARKNADO 5. While we had a couple of London-based gags we wanted to pull off with David (I thought it would be funny if David tried to convince a London bobby that sharks were falling from the sky), the timing didn’t work out to recreate that, but we did give David a really fun role playing a NATO Ambassador, whose last name should be very familiar.”

Ferrante continues, “Since I’m obsessed with AMERICAN WEREWOLF, I also couldn’t resist recreating the pose from the poster of that film with David (curiously enough we had similar jackets from LONDON for another blink-and-you-miss-it Easter egg in the film). David Naughton was super cool about it, and months later Lee F-W created AN AMERICAN SHARKNADO IN LONDON poster using that photo. It turned out pretty awesome, and I thought it would be cool to share it.”

Naughton also took a second to give us this quote, which is short, sweet, and quite fitting, “Beware the Shark!”